The past two weeks have been absolutely crazy. With the class, we all went to Berlin for the entire week going to museums, palaces, and a concentration camp. By the end of the week my feet hurt, my thoughts were filled with historical information, and my whole body ached for sleep. In a brief overview, I visited the Checkpoint Charlie Museum, Neu Palais in Potsdam, Sachsenhausen concentration camp, Deutsches Historisches Museum, Jewish Holocaust Museum, Pergammon Museum, the Berlin Wall, and a lot of random tourist sites. With all of the rain that occurred that week, it made the time absolutely draining but totally worth it. The Berlin Wall at the East Side Gallery was especially amazing.

After all the craziness of Berlin, a couple of the girls decided to travel down to Wittenberg before going all the way to Augsburg for the weekend. The small town atmosphere was a welcome change after all the hustle and bustle of the capitol city. The entire town of Wittenberg was such a quaint area that was entirely devoted to Martin Luther. The Castle Church and the City Church were relatively easy to walk to and venture inside. I stood right over Luther’s grave and got a picture in front of the infamous doors where the 95 Theses were supposedly nailed. To imagine that the basis of my religion started here almost 500 years ago was truly mind blowing. Walking through his house made it all the more real since I was able to see one of the Bibles he had copied hundreds of years previous. It was, simply put, peaceful.

And then… more craziness. Probably the craziest of all craziness: Oktoberfest. Being there on opening day of the 200th Anniversary of the festival was most definitely the busiest day we could have picked to go there. People were everywhere, and we were lucky to get a table outside. We deserved it though since we got into the festival at 8:30am. Beer was officially served at noon, and the craziness just got crazier. We met some awesome people from Koln and elsewhere, and overall it was a great time to socialize with everyone. Although I am officially the most exhausted from traveling as I have ever been, every minute was worth it. Now to rest up for the next adventures in Dresden and Leipzig come Friday!

Today we had a guided tour around the concentration camp of Sachsenhausen outside of Berlin. Starting out, we walked down the path that all prisoners would have had to travel down. It was really fascinating to think of all the people in the city that would have witnessed the prisoners being forced to work for their lives. Most people in Germany were led to believe that these prisoners deserved to be put away for the sake of the country, but it is hard to imagine that nobody could see through this false facade.

Our tour guide, Joe, was really insightful on all things about Sachsenhausen and many concentration camps in general. The camp served as a forced labor camp rather than an extermination or death camp like Auschwitz. This made the overall experience different than I expected. Rather than gruesome pictures of medical experiments and astronomical figures of casualties, the camp was much tamer than many stereotypes about concentration camps would assume.

However, this does not take away from the contemplative nature the site has to offer nor the devastation that was brought to many of the victims. We got to walk through a reconstructed bunker that housed hundreds of prisoners; these included political prisoners, social hazard ones, homosexuals, prisoners of war, and Jews. Conditions were horrible, and the lifestyle unimaginable.

It is hard to imagine that such terrible atrocities took place in the last century when the world was supposed to be more modernized and humane. Therefore, it is important to see these kind of sites first hand to try to understand everything that happened so nothing similar happens again. Our tour guide closed with a really powerful quote from Edmund Burke that I will repeat here. “All that’s necessary for the forces of evil to win in the world is for enough good men to do nothing.”

Being in a different country, especially one with a different language, typically brings about culture shock for the travelers. I have been able to travel around the world for a few weeks here and there, but I have never experienced this phenomenon. I have only now come to understand what culture shock can mean.

Living in Reutlingen, Germany is an absolutely wonderful place to be. The view outside my window is of some mountains in the distance, and, besides the weather, there is nothing really to complain about. The only difficulty comes with understanding all of the surroundings. Coming into this program with a French background and an eventual Chinese minor has not set me up with the necessary German language skills, but I am trying to learn as much as possible.

The most obvious difference is being around people that typically do not speak your own language. There is very little English spoken on a regular basis unless I am trying desperately to converse with someone. Therefore, every time I have ran into a British tour group or another bunch of Americans, I have become overly excited. English never sounded so good.

Other differences are smaller – like trying to do my laundry. My roommate and I decided that we would just know how to do laundry; I thought it was a part of my womanly senses no matter what country I was living in at the time. I could not have been more wrong. There are a vast amount of buttons on German laundry machines and a variety of different cycles. When this happens, my best advice is to watch the video posted on YouTube about doing laundry here. Rather, we took a guess and ended up with a pile of sopping wet clothes that we had to ring out in the nearby sink. That experience has taught me to always read the instructions in your own language first. Here’s some help: watch this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=essQiVHV9rA. That will get you started!

I cannot wait to see what new things will challenge me in the future. Hopefully, I will be a pro at laundry from now on, but I know there will be new cultural differences to face. And that is the fun of it all. What better way to grow as a person in confidence and tenacity than living in a foreign country for a semester? Future fiascos aside, I know this will be the best time of my life.